Marriage Matters: The poverty solution: marriage

Sunday

Oct 14, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Parents’ marriage and divorce is directly related to children’s well-being.

By James and Audora BurgJournal Correspondetns

Parents’ marriage and divorce is directly related to children’s well-being. This is not just a rosy ideal or bludgeon of the “family values” crowd but a reality repeatedly borne out by research. A report published last month testifies again to this connection.

Please note, our standard disclaimer applies: this is not an attack on single parents. We applaud the love and dedication they give their children, we are simply highlighting that there are different outcomes for children of married and single parents—so much so that our nation is seeing a two-caste system emerge based on parental marriage and education.

In the new Heritage Foundation report, “Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty,” author Robert Rector says that “Child poverty is an ongoing national concern, but few are aware that its principal cause is the absence of married fathers in the home. Marriage remains America’s strongest anti-poverty weapon, yet it continues to decline.”

According to the report, overall in the United States, having married parents drops the probability of child poverty by 76 percent. Further, marriage plays a bigger role in the poverty divide than even education does: on average, the poverty level of high school dropouts who are married is far lower than single parents who have one or two years of college.

As Rector writes, “Being married has roughly the same effect in reducing poverty that adding five or six years to a parent’s education has.”

He notes that many of the negative outcomes for children of unmarried parents are associated with the higher poverty rates of single mothers.

But money alone cannot address all of the outcomes. Rector writes, “In many cases, however, the improvements in child well-being that are associated with marriage persist even after adjusting for differences in family income. This indicates that the father brings more to his home than just a paycheck.”

Fathers make a difference. Even when comparing single-parents vs. married with the same race and parental education, children in the single-parent homes are more than twice as likely to be arrested for a juvenile crime, twice as likely to be treated for emotional and behavioral problems and to be suspended or expelled from school, and a third more likely to drop out before graduating from high school.

The data indicate that the effect of single-parent families lasts far into adulthood.

Even after adjusting for original differences in family income and poverty during childhood, children who grow up in single-parent homes are 50 percent more likely to experience poverty as adults as compared to children raised in intact married homes.

It may not be a popular message, but marriage matters.

James Burg, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue, Fort Wayne. His wife, Audora, is a freelance writer. You may contact them at marriage@charter.net